NWN - 1.69 Beta 10 Available

May 19th, 2008, 16:03

Lucky Day writes in with the news that the 1.69 Beta patch version 10 for Neverwinter Nights is now available, and he was kind enough to fill me in on the process a bit, so I'll quote him for anyone who's like me and not up to speed on this:

For the past 2 or so years Bioware has been working on its final patch, 1.69 for the original NWN. It never got much enthusiasm at the company until Brian Chung was hired from the Dragonlance Adventures (DLA) team and he and Craig Welburne began integrating features such as horses and the huge T'N'O tileset into it. That process has taken at least a year.

Beta 10 of this patch may very well be the final patch..finally!

Beta patch specific fixes made since Beta 9
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Significant improvements to the new horse scripting systems.
A lot of new tileset fixes.
Fixed an issue in the toolset, where erasing a tile that contained a door would cause the left mouse button state to get locked to the down state.
Moved Caravan loading screen tgas out of the patch bif and put them in override. Fixes issue with the desert caravan loading screens showing up at inappropriate times.
Moved NVidia dds texture fixes out of the patch bif and into xp2_tex_tpa.erf, so that the fixed textures actually get used by the game.
Moved fixed iit_midmisc_029.tga out of the patch bif and into override.
Tridents and Magic staves are now considered melee weapons by the scripting command GetMeleeWeapon() (x2_i0_spells).
Added references to additional Trogolodyte appearances in appearance.2da.
Fixed a few portraits that were classified under the incorrect gender/race (portraits.2da). Fixed incorrect row numbering in the following 2das: CLS_FEAT_BARD.2DA, CLS_FEAT_RANG.2DA, CLS_SKILL_ASASIN.2DA, CLS_SKILL_BARD.2DA, CLS_SKILL_DRU.2DA, CLS_SKILL_RANG.2DA, CLS_SKILL_ROG.2DA, CLS_SKILL_SHIFTR.2DA
Updated Horse heights and personal space values in the Appearance.2da.
Removed Trumpet/Horn of blasting from AmbientSounds.2da as they were highly annoying as looping sounds.
Added IP_CONST_FEAT_PLAYER_TOOL* constants to nwscript.nss
Fixed bad fxpa_mist.tga texture that was causing some toolset instability when using the "Castle Exterior, Rural" tileset.

What's funny on this patch is I've been pressing for a fix to gust of Wind on and off for years and I brought it up with this patch again. For the first time some other people picked up on the problem and we were going back and forth on our various fixes. Finally, Brian Chung has put it in.
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Also, this patch features the integration of the previous tilesets released as a separate hak . It will not include the Kingmaker's tileset however.

Another weird issue of note, they managed to hack a number of problems they couldn't get their head around by sticking the fixes in the Override directory and making sure they had priority and would activate. This a very clumsy way to do anything in NWN as the Override is strictly meant for testing.

-- “ Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.“ (E.F.Schumacher, Economist, Source)